[pacman-dev] Libraries for makepkg

[Allan McRae]

Sebastian Nowicki wrote:
> I'm not sure that I like the idea very much. We should keep away from  
> anything that makes PKGBUILDs more like Gentoo ebuilds. I love the  
> simplicity and, I suppose, explicitness of PKGBUILDs because they are  
> very easy to follow for anyone a bit familiar with shell. This might  
> be nice for some very simple stuff that's tedious, but obvious.  
> Anything that makes PKGBUILDs more cryptic than they currently are is  
> a step backwards, in my opinion. Maybe I haven't created enough  
> packages to see the benefits of this, but Gentoo ebuilds make me sick,  
> and that is the direction I see this going.
>
>   

I am not a fan of the gentoo ebuild system with functions appearing from 
nowhere and with no real way of find out what they are doing.  But that 
doesn't mean that makepkg couldn't benifit from some sort of library 
system.  If we take the proposal given in the bug report, you would have 
to explicitly include the function library you need.  e.g. above the 
build function there would be a line like:

source $libdir/create_desktop_file

That way when you use the create_desktop_file function, it is quite 
obvious where it comes from.  And it is simple to see the bash 
equivalent by looking in the sourced file.

I am in no way advocating that we go to the extent of the number of 
functions in the gentoo ebuild system.  That is why I said we would need 
to create some strict guidelines for the inclusion of a function.

Perhaps it would be best to create a list of potential functions for 
inclusion in such a library so we can better judge the trade-off in 
simplicity/clarity being made with this idea.

Allan